Tech Workers in China Organize a Rare Online Labour Movement
“For years China’s white-collar tech workers have been some of the most privileged in the country—and were prepared to put in any number of working hours in return. Now, as the economy slows and tech giants announce layoffs, pent-up anger over working hours is bubbling over. The most prominent protest over work hours is the 996.ICU project launched at the end of March on Microsoft’s GitHub code-sharing community. In days, the attempt to catalog companies who demand a 996 schedule—9 am to 9 pm, six days a week—became the site’s most book-marked or ‘starred’ project, racking up more than 190,000 stars.”
“More than 90 projects on GitHub have adopted the ‘anti-996′ license template, which was drafted by Katt Gu, a lawyer focused on advanced technologies who works with Shanghai-based digital privacy start-up Dimension, and Suji Yan, the startup’s CEO. ... The license requires companies who wants to use open-source software from those projects to commit to complying with local labor laws and International Labour Organization standards.”
Quartz, April 9, 2019: “How GitHub became a bulletin board for Chinese tech worker complaints,” by Tracy Qu
GItHub difficult to censor
“The Chinese government is normally quick to censor discussion of protest. However, in this case it is the internet companies themselves that seem to be taking the initiative. Users say that web browsers including those of Alibaba, Qihoo 360 and Tencent have failed to load the 996.icu pages. The irony has not been lost on social-media users. ‘So 996 developers at 996 companies had to work 996 to block a website about 996,’ one wrote on Weibo, a Twitter-like service. Jeffrey Knockel of Citizen Lab, an internet research group at the University of Toronto, says that tech firms must fear that the protesters have clout.”
“The 996.icu page has been GitHub’s most popular for weeks. That is because Chinese developers are such avid users of the platform for work purposes: their contributions are second only to those of Americans. They also know how useful it is for spreading sensitive information and evading China’s vast web-filtering system. Because GitHub is encrypted, it is harder for the state to censor bits of it selectively. Blocking it entirely would cripple China’s technology champions, whose programmers rely heavily on code shared on GitHub. In 2013 the government did try blocking the platform. Complaints from developers brought it back online within days. Its appeal is not limited to techies. Mengyang Zhao, who researches tech activism at the University of Pennsylvania, says that Chinese NGO workers now use GitHub to back up articles posted on WeChat that are at risk of being censored.”
The Economist, April 20, 2019: “Office workers in China organise a rare online labour movement”
Wired, April 4, 2019: “How Github is helping overworked Chinese Programmers,” by Klint Finley
996.ICU Project Repository
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